Yulin dog meat festival opens despite controversy

Animal activists hold banners against Yulin Dog Meat Festival in front of Yulin City Representative office in Beijing. Photo : Reuters
Animal activists hold banners against Yulin Dog Meat Festival in front of Yulin City Representative office in Beijing. Photo : Reuters

Crowds flocked to China’s most notorious dog meat festival to buy butchered canines as it opened Tuesday, activists on the scene said, as the annual slaughter proceeded despite international outrage.

AFP reported, more than 10,000 dogs are killed at the event in conditions activists describe as brutal, with dogs beaten and boiled alive in the belief that the more terrified they are, the tastier the meat.

The summer solstice event proceeded despite a 11 million signature petition sent by HSI to President Xi Jinping demanding an end to the festival and video appeals from celebrities such as Matt Damon and Rooney Mara.

China’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying on Tuesday denied it was an official event, telling AFP that the city government of Yulin “has never supported, organised or held a so-called Yulin dog meat festival”.

“It is a personal dietary preference”, she added. “There does not exist a festival that goes by the name ‘dog meat’.”

State-run Chinese media have defended the festival, with an editorial in the Global Times newspaper criticising foreign activism as a kind of “cultural extremism”.

“Now Westerners are demanding non-Westerners change their eating habits, because they think their cultures and feelings deserve more respect than others,” it said last week.

Some locals say that protests have had the perverse effect of spurring more people to eat canines, but other activists said there were fewer dog meat vendors than in years past.

“There are basically two groups of people eating dog meat,” Li said. “One group are people who really love dog meat. The second group are political eaters,” who eat to show local pride and to spite outsiders, rather than out of taste.

Though there was only a small number of dogs on sale at the city’s central market, several activists bought the animals which would otherwise end up on the grill according to a Reuters report.

“Dogs are man’s best, the most loyal friend. How could we eat our friends? You tell me,” Yang Yuhua told Reuters. Yang, an animal rights activist flew from the southwestern city of Chongqing to buy dogs sold at this year’s festival. She spent over 1,000 yuan ($150) to buy two caged dogs at the market from the vendor.

Despite the open sales, the Chinese for “dog meat” could not be found at any restaurants specialising in dog.

Xu Yongfen, a restaurant owner from eastern Anhui province, said he was disappointed in the city efforts to keep the festival low key.

“The people of Yulin can see so many dog lovers who like dogs, so they don’t want to connect (anything) with dog. I personally like eating dog meat,” he told Reuters.

Dog ownership was once looked down upon as a decadent bourgeois habit, but China’s growing middle class has started to fight what it sees as barbarous abuse. It is a traditional food mostly in southern China, where people believe eating the meat is good for the body during the steamy summers.